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Mistress Velvet got started in the sex work game a few years ago, saying she thought it would be “really fun, and it’s a lot of money, so why not try.”

The master’s degree holder works as a dominatrix near Chicago, where men, who she says are mostly “white and cisgender,” hire her to be the dominant role in a dominate/submission sexual arrangement.

She soon found, according to the Huffington Post, that BDSM can be a space fo “black women’s healing.”

“Over time, Mistress Velvet said she began ‘doing a lot of theorizing’ about the power dynamics of a black woman holding that kind of supremacy over a white cisgender man. She began introducing black feminist theory into her sessions with clients,” reports HuffPo.

According to the mistress, after her intersectional whipping, bondage, and humiliation sessions, “One client said he noticed he only held the door open for black women. Another, whom Mistress Velvet educated about the systemic oppression of black women, founded a nonprofit to support black mothers on Chicago’s South Side.”

Speaking to the HuffPo, Mistress Velvet called her sessions a “safe space” for men that “may not be seen as masculine,” because of the “ways that patriarchy impacts men, they can’t really be submissive in a lot of contexts.”

But simply beating up white men isn’t enough.

She also described her work as a form of “reparations,” saying she introduces black feminist literature into her sessions, “like Audre Lorde and Patricia Hill Collins, and make these men actually read about black feminism. Then, it’s moving from them simply fetishizing black women, to realizing: This is a systemic issue I’m contributing to by the virtue of being a white man and being rich,” she told HuffPo.

How does the white guilt orgy usually begin? Velvet described a typical scene:

In terms of unpacking their way of fetishizing black women and stereotypes about black women, I ask them, “Why do you want to be in my presence, why do you find me attractive?” And sometimes they might say things that then remind me of stereotypes of black women ― like a jezebel or something ― so I’ll have them read a piece about how what they said is related to this historic phenomenon about thinking about black women. I say, “Here are its roots. Here’s why it’s problematic.”

She wrote a thesis on how sex work like hers can be a part of “healing” for black women.

“In the sense that there is so much black femme trauma, to be able to be in a space for an hour, then you leave that space and go back to being one of the most oppressed group ― in that hour, it can be really liberating. It can be a form of self-care,” she told HuffPo.

Velvet went on to describe a great irony in her life. That after beating up a man for hour and making him read intersectional feminism texts, she’ll put her normal clothes on, leave, and get cat-called on the street.

“I’m like, really? It’s so polarizing. It’s so jarring. I’m not saying that I need to beat every man that I see, but I also don’t understand why I can’t walk two blocks without being harassed,” she said.

But she said ultimately the purpose of her work is to help folks get woke.

“People end up really growing and learning more about themselves in that space. I feel very honored that I can provide that,” she said.